Abstract [en]

In this article, the roots and premises of post-communist transitology which became prominent during the 1990s are critically contextualized from the point of view of intellectual history. Attention is paid not only to the development of the concept oftime, but also of history, development, evolution, progress, revolution and acceleration.The notion of regime change is reconstructed and traced through the politicalphilosophy of Greek antiquity, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, as well as in scientific thought and debate of the 19th century, in the modernization theories of the1950s, and in the "transitology" of the 1970s and 1980s dealing with Southern Europe and Latin America. The analysis takes its point of departure in a comparison between post-communist transitology and Cold War Sovietology and critically assesses implications of teleology, chronocentrism and ethnocentrism.